I don't think Harris is a particularly serious scholar.
I have no take on the first question, but a clear answer to the third is that a deterministic system is not incompatible with learning. You change the input, you change the behavior of the system. Here, the relevant input is the information that is provided by Harris' argument.
This also, I think (?) is relevant to the second question. A person has developed a set of mental structures via genetics and learning. The impulse to engage in these "other modes of consciousness" could be just a learned response to a given set of circumstances, with the exact form of that response again dependant on the interaction of nature and nurture.
> On what days can he claim that this thought is true, and the belief in free will is false, if both thoughts arise from unconscious sources we don't control?
What does one thing have to do with the other? Is a thought true because we thought of it ex nihilo? Something is true if it accurately reflects reality, not because it's source is under our control.
To me it seems that Sam makes the case that our consciousness is not in control of our decisions because our impulses to make a certain decision or to think a thought arise from unconscious process. Based on my own experience I agree completely with this assessment. I think there is evidence that points to our decisions being made prior to our conscious awareness of making them? The question I am stuck with is if this is what free will is about? I never felt I understood the concept at all. Free from what? Or free to do what? In my view we make choices based on sensory input, past experience, genetic makeup etc. All internal and external factors are processed in our brain, a choice is made, we become aware of it and execute. In a way it is free if no one else is controlling us, forcing us to do this or that. I don’t see how it can be free in any other way, that is free to make another choice than the output of our internal unconscious process. Sure we can become aware of something we are about to do and regrett it and stop ourselves, but that just seems like another loop of the same process. I think Sam has a good point and I haven’t heard anything that convinces me to reject his perspective.
It seems to me that the main role that consciousness plays in decision making is after-the-fact evaluation, which would presumably become a training signal for the systems that do the first-order decision making. In slow, deliberative decision processes, in which many possibilities are considered, evaluated, reconsidered, and reevaluated, it seems to me that consciousness could play an important role in the outcome. And even in rapid decisions, consciousness has still played a role in the shaping the subconscious systems that are doing the immediate decision making, even if consciousness is far from the only thing that has shaped them.
And as far as i'm concerned, if my consciousness ends up being the deciding factor in a decision, whether directly or indirectly, that's good enough to call it free will. Even if the system as a whole, of which my consciousness is a part, is deterministic. (Or has some fundamental randomness, which seems irrelevant to the question to me.)
> I think there is evidence that points to our decisions being made prior to our conscious awareness of making them?
If you're referring to the Libet experiment, it's interpretation has been overturned. Harris did use to use this experiment as evidence. But it's no longer a valid argument.
> The question I am stuck with is if this is what free will is about?
Free will is typically understood as the subjective experience of being the system which makes a decision.
> I never felt I understood the concept at all. Free from what?
Coercion typically. To say an action is taken of ones own free will is usually a statement that someone's action matches their volition. There is another sense called "libertarianism" which is often confused for broader free will that argues one is free from determinism. That will can violate causality.
> Or free to do what?
As one pleases.
> In my view we make choices based on sensory input, past experience, genetic makeup etc.
All of these things comprise "me".
To say they are making the decision is to leave what constitutes "me" empty.
> All internal and external factors are processed in our brain, a choice is made, we become aware of it and execute. In a way it is free if no one else is controlling us, forcing us to do this or that.
That's right.
Or as in Harris former argument, if the order you just presented is illusory and we begin executing before we become aware or make a choice and then fudge the order of events in our memory. This turns out to not be supported by experiment however.
>His belief in the arguments for determinism would equally be due to outside causal sources, which would cause him to believe such arguments sound. Free will advocates would, by the same token, be caused to believe their belief in free will sound. Determinism seems to undermine its ability to claim itself true.
I'm not sure I understand your argument here. I haven't read Dawkins, but your presentation of his views at least seems to be that we don't really control our own thoughts, and I don't immediately see how that's connected to whether or not our thoughts are true.
I think Sam makes a strong basic case - that traditional descriptions of free will fail common sense, and that the philosophy community pulled a big equivocation bait-n-switch between "making decisions" and "the ability to use the physical hardware to think while ignoring the physics it relies upon".
His extension of that mechanical view is that understanding the preconscious, conditioned, and environmental inputs upon our thinking should make us consider someone with poor judgement in a poor situation as failed hardware needing fixed or placed in a different environment, rather than homo moralis agens perfectly deserving of harsh punishment.
I think compatibilism of the sort espoused by Daniel Dennett to be a better explanation and better philosophy than Harris's determinism.
How can readers abandon their belief in free will if they don't author or control their thoughts, and how can they redirect their behavior to help support institutional change if the future has already been causally fixed, which Sam says applies to all of our future states of mind and corresponding actions.
Playing word games now? Sam's point is not that people cannot change their minds on a subject, but that this possible change is already beyond their control.
For example, advertisers are forcing your brain to rewire against your will. You have no choice on remembering that catchy jingle. Sam would say you have no choice in that his book will have some effect on you, and you have no choice on the environment that conditioned you to accept or reject his book and possibly change your behavior because of it.
I have not seen any evidence that the universe is truly random, rather than pseudorandom from our limited information. Superdeterminism was still on the table unless something happened recently in quantum physics or string theory I missed.
Random chance is not free will. Being a slave to a dice roll is no difference than being slave to a clockwork. What makes it will, and not noise, is how non-random and directed and intentional it is.
There is a big disconnect between a sort of philosophical free will and a common sense free will. The ability to operate outside the laws of physics or use random chance to ignore them does not exist. The ability to understand your own desires and then to act upon them is self-evident, even if we lack control over the various sources of those desires. I feel these two are often confused or are intentionally and falsely equivocated.
If our thoughts are not deterministic but somewhat random, it does change much. It's either deterministic will, random will or a mixture of both, but it still doesn't put us in "true control" of anything. Our thoughts remain a product of either deterministic or probabilistic rules. Whatever mechanism may generate our thoughts, we don't control it: the product does not control the producer.
I think you are going to have to define "we" and "control." The way you seem to be defining things, "true control" is logically impossible and therefore meaningless.
Speaking of defining terms, in the concept of free will, I'm curious to know what it is supposed to be free from. I don't imagine it can be free from the process that causes it to happen. Because of this, it doesn't matter if the process is probabilistic or deterministic: it still produces our thoughts and there is nothing we can do about that. We witness our thoughts, we don't decide what they are going to be. I don't see how it would be possible, hence free will is indeed a meaningless idea.
>I don't imagine it can be free from the process that causes it to happen.
If by "it" here you mean free will, then you appear to be claiming that free will cannot be free from itself. I am not sure what that is even supposed to mean. In any case, it does not impact claims about causative forces outside of itself, which is what the debate is really about.
Sorry, that was poorly worded. I meant to say that our thoughts are produced by some process. We act on our thoughts, and the choices we make are the thoughts we act on. If our thoughts are produced by some process then we cannot be free from the process that produces them, so our choices are not free. Our choices are generated by some process that we need to have in order to think.
> In any case, it does not impact claims about causative forces outside of itself, which is what the debate is really about.
Ok then, we are leaving philosophy to enter sociology. Society needs to isolate individuals in order to implement accountability, so whatever individuals do when they are not coerced is deemed free will. The law demands free will. But that's not really philosophy.
If they also cannot be predicted from within our mind even in theory then it's all the same. Our thoughts may be deterministic, they may be probabilistic, but they remain unknowable until after they have happened. We don't decide what our thoughts are going to be, we only know what they are after they became what they are.
What would it look like to have consciousness where we determine what our thoughts are going to be? How would you distinguish that from probabilistic emergent thoughts, especially with regard to free will?
You would first have to think about what you will think next, but you wouldn't control the first thought about what your next thought should be, so it's the same thing. You're probably starting to think right now about what your response to this post should be, but you didn't decide to think about that response: the thought of coming up with a response was produced by neural processes you don't control within your brain. Would you prefer your neurons to operate deterministically or probabilistically as they generate your thoughts? For me, it makes no difference.
While I appreciate that Harris beings a section of the public's eye to this question, he doesn't really ever engage with theajor arguments or even questions around free will in philosophy.
For a while, he promoted a since debunked notion that we had measured the nervous system committing to taking an action long before the mind "decided" to take the action. But it's been falsified.
SirVelociraptor | 11 hours ago
I don't think Harris is a particularly serious scholar.
I have no take on the first question, but a clear answer to the third is that a deterministic system is not incompatible with learning. You change the input, you change the behavior of the system. Here, the relevant input is the information that is provided by Harris' argument.
This also, I think (?) is relevant to the second question. A person has developed a set of mental structures via genetics and learning. The impulse to engage in these "other modes of consciousness" could be just a learned response to a given set of circumstances, with the exact form of that response again dependant on the interaction of nature and nurture.
But this is not my area so who knows.
A_Tiger_in_Africa | 11 hours ago
> On what days can he claim that this thought is true, and the belief in free will is false, if both thoughts arise from unconscious sources we don't control?
What does one thing have to do with the other? Is a thought true because we thought of it ex nihilo? Something is true if it accurately reflects reality, not because it's source is under our control.
Totte_B | 10 hours ago
To me it seems that Sam makes the case that our consciousness is not in control of our decisions because our impulses to make a certain decision or to think a thought arise from unconscious process. Based on my own experience I agree completely with this assessment. I think there is evidence that points to our decisions being made prior to our conscious awareness of making them? The question I am stuck with is if this is what free will is about? I never felt I understood the concept at all. Free from what? Or free to do what? In my view we make choices based on sensory input, past experience, genetic makeup etc. All internal and external factors are processed in our brain, a choice is made, we become aware of it and execute. In a way it is free if no one else is controlling us, forcing us to do this or that. I don’t see how it can be free in any other way, that is free to make another choice than the output of our internal unconscious process. Sure we can become aware of something we are about to do and regrett it and stop ourselves, but that just seems like another loop of the same process. I think Sam has a good point and I haven’t heard anything that convinces me to reject his perspective.
bloodvash1 | 9 hours ago
It seems to me that the main role that consciousness plays in decision making is after-the-fact evaluation, which would presumably become a training signal for the systems that do the first-order decision making. In slow, deliberative decision processes, in which many possibilities are considered, evaluated, reconsidered, and reevaluated, it seems to me that consciousness could play an important role in the outcome. And even in rapid decisions, consciousness has still played a role in the shaping the subconscious systems that are doing the immediate decision making, even if consciousness is far from the only thing that has shaped them.
And as far as i'm concerned, if my consciousness ends up being the deciding factor in a decision, whether directly or indirectly, that's good enough to call it free will. Even if the system as a whole, of which my consciousness is a part, is deterministic. (Or has some fundamental randomness, which seems irrelevant to the question to me.)
fox-mcleod | 8 hours ago
> I think there is evidence that points to our decisions being made prior to our conscious awareness of making them?
If you're referring to the Libet experiment, it's interpretation has been overturned. Harris did use to use this experiment as evidence. But it's no longer a valid argument.
> The question I am stuck with is if this is what free will is about?
Free will is typically understood as the subjective experience of being the system which makes a decision.
> I never felt I understood the concept at all. Free from what?
Coercion typically. To say an action is taken of ones own free will is usually a statement that someone's action matches their volition. There is another sense called "libertarianism" which is often confused for broader free will that argues one is free from determinism. That will can violate causality.
> Or free to do what?
As one pleases.
> In my view we make choices based on sensory input, past experience, genetic makeup etc.
All of these things comprise "me".
To say they are making the decision is to leave what constitutes "me" empty.
> All internal and external factors are processed in our brain, a choice is made, we become aware of it and execute. In a way it is free if no one else is controlling us, forcing us to do this or that.
That's right.
Or as in Harris former argument, if the order you just presented is illusory and we begin executing before we become aware or make a choice and then fudge the order of events in our memory. This turns out to not be supported by experiment however.
zoo_tickles | 11 hours ago
How can a case be made against anything we’ve never actually defined?
DigitalMindShadow | 2 hours ago
Or in favor of it, for that matter?
PotusChrist | 10 hours ago
>His belief in the arguments for determinism would equally be due to outside causal sources, which would cause him to believe such arguments sound. Free will advocates would, by the same token, be caused to believe their belief in free will sound. Determinism seems to undermine its ability to claim itself true.
I'm not sure I understand your argument here. I haven't read Dawkins, but your presentation of his views at least seems to be that we don't really control our own thoughts, and I don't immediately see how that's connected to whether or not our thoughts are true.
ThMogget | 5 hours ago
I think Sam makes a strong basic case - that traditional descriptions of free will fail common sense, and that the philosophy community pulled a big equivocation bait-n-switch between "making decisions" and "the ability to use the physical hardware to think while ignoring the physics it relies upon".
His extension of that mechanical view is that understanding the preconscious, conditioned, and environmental inputs upon our thinking should make us consider someone with poor judgement in a poor situation as failed hardware needing fixed or placed in a different environment, rather than homo moralis agens perfectly deserving of harsh punishment.
I think compatibilism of the sort espoused by Daniel Dennett to be a better explanation and better philosophy than Harris's determinism.
ThMogget | 4 hours ago
How can readers abandon their belief in free will if they don't author or control their thoughts, and how can they redirect their behavior to help support institutional change if the future has already been causally fixed, which Sam says applies to all of our future states of mind and corresponding actions.
Playing word games now? Sam's point is not that people cannot change their minds on a subject, but that this possible change is already beyond their control.
For example, advertisers are forcing your brain to rewire against your will. You have no choice on remembering that catchy jingle. Sam would say you have no choice in that his book will have some effect on you, and you have no choice on the environment that conditioned you to accept or reject his book and possibly change your behavior because of it.
ThatIsAmorte | 10 hours ago
No, because strong determinism is not true. The universe is not 100% deterministic.
ThMogget | 5 hours ago
I have not seen any evidence that the universe is truly random, rather than pseudorandom from our limited information. Superdeterminism was still on the table unless something happened recently in quantum physics or string theory I missed.
Random chance is not free will. Being a slave to a dice roll is no difference than being slave to a clockwork. What makes it will, and not noise, is how non-random and directed and intentional it is.
There is a big disconnect between a sort of philosophical free will and a common sense free will. The ability to operate outside the laws of physics or use random chance to ignore them does not exist. The ability to understand your own desires and then to act upon them is self-evident, even if we lack control over the various sources of those desires. I feel these two are often confused or are intentionally and falsely equivocated.
sohcahtoa | 9 hours ago
If our thoughts are not deterministic but somewhat random, it does change much. It's either deterministic will, random will or a mixture of both, but it still doesn't put us in "true control" of anything. Our thoughts remain a product of either deterministic or probabilistic rules. Whatever mechanism may generate our thoughts, we don't control it: the product does not control the producer.
ThatIsAmorte | 9 hours ago
I think you are going to have to define "we" and "control." The way you seem to be defining things, "true control" is logically impossible and therefore meaningless.
sohcahtoa | 7 hours ago
Speaking of defining terms, in the concept of free will, I'm curious to know what it is supposed to be free from. I don't imagine it can be free from the process that causes it to happen. Because of this, it doesn't matter if the process is probabilistic or deterministic: it still produces our thoughts and there is nothing we can do about that. We witness our thoughts, we don't decide what they are going to be. I don't see how it would be possible, hence free will is indeed a meaningless idea.
Adjunctified | 6 hours ago
Exactly this
ThatIsAmorte | 5 hours ago
>I don't imagine it can be free from the process that causes it to happen.
If by "it" here you mean free will, then you appear to be claiming that free will cannot be free from itself. I am not sure what that is even supposed to mean. In any case, it does not impact claims about causative forces outside of itself, which is what the debate is really about.
sohcahtoa | 3 hours ago
Sorry, that was poorly worded. I meant to say that our thoughts are produced by some process. We act on our thoughts, and the choices we make are the thoughts we act on. If our thoughts are produced by some process then we cannot be free from the process that produces them, so our choices are not free. Our choices are generated by some process that we need to have in order to think.
> In any case, it does not impact claims about causative forces outside of itself, which is what the debate is really about.
Ok then, we are leaving philosophy to enter sociology. Society needs to isolate individuals in order to implement accountability, so whatever individuals do when they are not coerced is deemed free will. The law demands free will. But that's not really philosophy.
planx_constant | 7 hours ago
If your thoughts and decisions can't be predicted from outside your mind even in theory, how is that NOT free will?
sohcahtoa | 7 hours ago
If they also cannot be predicted from within our mind even in theory then it's all the same. Our thoughts may be deterministic, they may be probabilistic, but they remain unknowable until after they have happened. We don't decide what our thoughts are going to be, we only know what they are after they became what they are.
planx_constant | 6 hours ago
What would it look like to have consciousness where we determine what our thoughts are going to be? How would you distinguish that from probabilistic emergent thoughts, especially with regard to free will?
sohcahtoa | 5 hours ago
You would first have to think about what you will think next, but you wouldn't control the first thought about what your next thought should be, so it's the same thing. You're probably starting to think right now about what your response to this post should be, but you didn't decide to think about that response: the thought of coming up with a response was produced by neural processes you don't control within your brain. Would you prefer your neurons to operate deterministically or probabilistically as they generate your thoughts? For me, it makes no difference.
daniel-sousa-me | 6 hours ago
Does a coin have free will?
planx_constant | 5 hours ago
You can very much predict the outcome of a coin flip. I'd also argue that free will necessitates consciousness, which a coin does not possess.
fox-mcleod | 8 hours ago
While I appreciate that Harris beings a section of the public's eye to this question, he doesn't really ever engage with theajor arguments or even questions around free will in philosophy.
For a while, he promoted a since debunked notion that we had measured the nervous system committing to taking an action long before the mind "decided" to take the action. But it's been falsified.